Common Sense

Common sense is, according to Merriam-Webster, the ability to think and behave in a reasonable way and to make good decisions. Dictionary.com's definition is similar: sound practical judgment that is independent of specialized knowledge, training, or the like; normal native intelligence. Common sense is also the name of a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine that strongly urged the United States to declare independence from Great Britain.

All good, right? Who could argue? Anyone? ... Okay, I will.

I have a problem with the whole, "independent of specialized knowledge, training, etc." part. The trouble is that sometimes training and specialized knowledge trumps (excuse the term) "reasonable" common sense. In fact, specialized knowledge such as science often does that.

The facts that the earth  is round, that it revolves around the sun, that gravity exists, etc., seem like common sense now, but this wasn't always the case. For most of human existence, our everyday knowledge and experience was that of a flat earth, which the sun, moon, planets and stars revolved around. Gravity? Yes, things fell, but so what? These observations served us well for millennia. Only now, when global manufacturing, communications and transportation depend on roundness, heliocentricity (I just made that word up!) and gravity, do we add such things to our collective common sense.

Along came modern physics, with its relativity and quantum mechanics. These are about as far removed from common sense as we can get. Yet they've been repeatedly proven and even applied, such that a mountain of science and engineering now depend on these theories. Most of us, however, don't normally take modern physics into account during our day to day lives. We turn on a light switch, and don't consider whether those electrons in the wires may have been generated at a nuclear facility. A nuclear explosion would encourage incorporation of modern physics into our common sense, but that would be a bit drastic.

You know where this is going.

Common sense tells us that species can't evolve, since we can't see it happen before our eyes. Yet science proves otherwise, believe it or not. Common sense tells us that burning something like fossil fuels may pollute the air with particulates that we can see, but not with carbon dioxide, that we can't. And common sense tells us that even if we do create a little carbon dioxide. it couldn't manifest itself into the atmosphere to create a greenhouse effect. Yet science begs to differ. Proof is readily available now, but it will take time to sink into our collective common sense. The trouble is that we are running out of time for this to happen. The burning of fossil fuels needs to stop now for the planet to have any chance to recover from the climate change crisis that is happening before our eyes.

It's almost like religious faith. Except for one thing: religious faith is unprovable (I just made that word up too!), whereas science, by definition, is absolutely verifiable. Further, it is self-correcting.

It's cold today. That proves that global warming is wrong. It's just plain common sense.

You Bred Raptors

It occurred early on in the movie Jurassic Park, and it was a statement; not a question. Overall, the scene is otherwise an endearing one: it's wonderful to watch the baby dinosaur hatching, as well as the peoples' reactions to the event. Then, just after one character famously states that 'Life finds a way,' the other one learns of the species and says, 'You bred raptors.' The phrase has been popular enough to become the name of a rock band.

Those ominous three words also work as a metaphor for what our country has done to itself. This, friends, is the point where this post stops being so much fun.

The United States of America has elected a President who will do severe damage to our economy, our environment and for basic human rights. The last time we elected an incompetent ideologue, we went from a nation at peace - a prosperous one that had a budget surplus, to a country fighting two wars, a huge budget deficit, high unemployment and an economy on the precipice of a depression. It has taken seven and a half years to slowly climb out of that hole. Now we have ended the two wars, unemployment is down, and the budget deficit is shrunk to below where it was in 2007/8. The economy has grown, albeit slowly, for each of these seven years, a run is truly remarkable. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump will be even more incompetent than President George W. Bush, and all of these things and more, will become much worse. The raptors are now in charge.

The focus of this blog is the environment, so we will limit the remainder of the discussion to that realm. The outlook for the ecology of the United States as well as that of the entire world is dark. It had been bleak before, even when someone with good intentions was in charge. The new sheriff (or, if you prefer, raptor) is promising to do away with what progress we've been able to make towards putting a stop to climate change. Let's get more specific.

Trump has named a noted climate change denier to lead his EPA transition team. Myron Ebell was named in a Scientific American article as heralding big, divisive changes to to the EPA. In fact, Ebell is a well-known and polarizing figure in all matter regarding energy and the environment. "His participation in the EPA transition signals that the Trump team is looking to drastically reshape the climate policies the agency has pursued under the Obama administration. Ebell’s role is likely to infuriate environmentalists and Democrats but buoy critics of Obama’s climate rules."

Ebell is even in favor of doing away with the agency, which is our only line of defense toward anyone doing harm to our planet's environment. He described Newt Gingrich's suggestion to abolish the EPA as "Bold and Visionary".

Republicans in both houses of Congress may not like Mr. Trump, but they will certainly agree with his reactionary push back toward the burning of fossil fuels. The greatest oxymoron of all time, "clean coal", is part of the party platform.

There are dark days ahead, friends. The raptors are in charge.

What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?

The title of a 1966 movie, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? has me thinking. What will we tell our kids? Our grandkids? Because surely the conversation, real or hypothetical, will happen. Until recently, I thought of this talk occurring perhaps 20 or 30 years in the future, when the effect of humanity’s greed, pollution and waste has made the planet’s environment a dangerously changing place for all of us. But I need to think again.

The consequences of climate change are here now. The near-death of Earth’s Oceans is here now. So many other effects of our waste and pollution, too numerous to even mention, are here now. Thus the conversation about what we all did about it, may as well occur now too. The most troubling part of all this is that these challenges are only beginning. Our discussion can certainly be an on-going one.

What did you do? What are you doing? What can you do? What should you do? It doesn’t matter so much when you are asked these questions; now or 30 years from now. It boils down to this: are you part of the problem, or part of the solution?

Never thought about it? It’s never too late to start. There are plenty of things that you can do right now, just to begin with.

Not the least of these, and one of the simplest, is to vote for people who will do the right thing. Doing what is right for the planet amounts to doing what's right for one's constituents. Those who do that will invariably also do the right things in other policy matters as well. The choices, especially the one for President, couldn’t be more stark.

And the war part? It most definitely is a war. If you’re on the wrong side, history, and even your ancestors, will judge you harshly.

Please don't vote against Trump

Yes, I'm being serious here. This will be one of my final five to ten pleas for sanity before the election finally occurs. Please don't vote against Donald Trump because the man is a




Misogynist
Con-man/Swindler
Bigot
Pawn of Putin
Cheat
Racist
Unstable (for someone with access to nuclear codes)


Don't vote against Donald Trump because he represents the Republican platform and the Republican party. This is the party that put him into his present position. He represents it, and he represents the people who voted for him in the primaries. It's not a good reason to vote against him.


Here is why you should vote against Donald Trump: he would destroy the environment. This man who called climate change a Chinese Hoax, would stop at nothing to exploit our planet's resources in favor of his interests, and those of his rich friends; and to the detriment of the remainder of mankind. In fact, Trump denies not only the science of climate change, but Science itself. And unfortunately, although he differs from the rest of his party on some issues, they agree completely on this one.


Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, does grasp the enormity and the undeniable importance of the issue. The differences between the two candidates are more stark here than almost anywhere.


That is why you should vote against Donald Trump. To take it one step further, you should vote for Hillary Clinton... for the planet's sake.

Make the Switch to Renewable Energy for Your Electric Supply

We should all put our money where our mouth is. I don't think it will taste very good, but that's another story. In other posts, I've been urging readers to vote as if our planet depended on it. This makes the choice very easy. Of course there are other things that we can do as well: reduce, reuse, recycle. Walk. Drive a fuel efficient car. Lower your thermostat in the winter, raise it in the summer. That kind of stuff.

There's another thing you can do as well: demand renewable energy. It's actually quite easy (even I was able to do it) and it may very well actually save you money. The way to do it is to change your electric energy supplier to a renewable source. I learned something about this from the Sierra Club Portage Trail Group's President's corner for September and October.  Therein, Colleen Orsburn states, "if you switch to one of these plans, your transmission utility does not change; for most of us, that is Ohio Edison, a FirstEnergy company.  And switching does not actually change the source of your electricity.  All generators feed power into the regional grid, and you get what you get.  What you are doing by switching to a renewable energy provider is offsetting your energy use with the purchase of Renewable Energy Credits, which in turn support renewable energy generation projects."   So it's mostly just going to have the effect of increasing the demand for green energy.

The directions are there, and they may well work for you if you live in Northeast Ohio. But they didn't quite work for me, because my current supplier is NOPEC-First Energy Solutions. NOPEC would charge a $75 early termination fee to switch to a Green Energy supplier listed at the First Energy website. I didn't want to pay that.

But never fear. NOPEC itself has a renewable energy option that I was able to switch to without incurring the termination fee. And the fixed rate is cheaper than the one I had by about ten percent!

I urge you to make the switch as well. It's just a small thing, but if a enough of us do it, it could be huge.

If You Believe…

If you believe in Andropogenic (caused by humans) Climate Change, then…

So far, we have a Subject and one sentence within the text body of the post, and six periods. Bear with me, and we’ll see if we cans stretch some of those dots out. In regards to Climate Change, there are those who believe the science, those who do not believe the science, and those who might believe, but who don’t think that the evidence is conclusive. Let’s call them believers, atheists and agnostics. The religious connotation of that statement is, I believe apt.

Science and Religion are two sides of the same coin in the sense that you either believe or you don’t. They are entirely different in another sense though. One is based on fact and is self-correcting, while the other is based entirely on faith. In my opinion, there doesn’t need to be a clash at all. A phrase attributed to Jesus in the synoptic bibles reads, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." The original discussion was whether taxes should be paid, but I think that we could make the case for substituting science for government in this case (not that I’d recommend that in general). So just replace the word ‘Caesar’ with ‘Science’, and we’re set.

Okay, there’s one minor problem. That which is getting rendered to Science is getting bigger, and God’s piece of the pie is getting smaller. That’s the problem of a God of the Gaps theory. But even so, we could still make the case that religious faith and science can co-exist. A good many scientists, philosophers and theologians believe that science is true (now there’s a word we could discuss further), but are also still able to maintain religious faith.  

Forgive me. I didn’t quite mean to go off on such a tangent about science and religion. What I did want to do is call attention to the belief in science. I think most people would say they do, but even so, perhaps not quite so many believe that Andropogenic Climate Change is a fact.

How many? Polls vary, but the latest shows that “Sixty-four percent of U.S. adults say they are worried a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ about global warming”. The percentage appears to be higher in other parts of the developed world. I think that whether you are worried, and therefore believe in climate change depends mostly on your belief in science.

So the remaining thirty-six percent must be the agnostics and atheists. But not (quite) so fast. Some of those who did express concern concede that climate change may be happening, but are agnostic or atheistic as to whether humans have caused it. The polls cited here didn’t address this question, but others have. We’ve evolved on this question too, however. The query about whether global warming is happening at all used to be more in question. Now the polls show that more people do accept that it’s occurring (hurray for at least this aspect of science), but still may not believe that humans are the cause. But there’s science behind the Andropogenic-ism of it as well. A lot of it. So much, that 97% of climate scientists and their scientific papers say so. I know some have questioned those numbers, but it is still as close to a consensus as there is on anything.

Let’s say that you are convinced. Either a) you were already a believer, or b) I convinced you (and I know that’s highly unlikely). Let’s change the focus here from If you believe, to Since you believe.

Since you believe that Andropogenic Climate Change is real, what are you going to do about it? Wouldn’t it then be the most important global issue facing our planet and our species? I sure think so, and I said so in a previous post. Therein I urged you, my Earth-Loving Friends, to cast your vote in this upcoming Presidential Election based on Environmental issues alone. That is the single most important thing you can do to help us out of this hole we’ve been digging for ourselves. Casting your vote in this direction will almost certainly also cast it in favor of other aspects of humanity that are also on the correct side of history.

It’s a Trap

Okay, you got us. It’s a hoax, a trap; sort of like when the giant squid-like thing in the Star Wars movie figured out that, “It’s a Trap!” I love that line.

Back to the hoax. Yes, we sorry-ass environmentalists have perpetuated this hoax to get more people using renewable energy for our own evil purposes. Deep in our hearts, we know that burning dirty fossil fuels are really good for us. We do understand that it’s really better for everyone if a few rich people get richer as we all continue to pollute. (Okay, some coal miners  too, but there are other ways to help them out.)

But we won’t act on that deep understanding of the way the world works. Instead, our evil scheme is to change things; to lean forward, so to speak. We want to help the United States transition to clean, renewable energy and ruin those unfortunate rich people.

What if we get our way, and they find out that we truly were wrong, that it was a hoax. It will be a disaster! We’ll have made the earth a better place to live for nothing.